Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

Hugh Pickens continues: "Like observing that whenever his mother would lose weight, his father would gain weight, and then linking the two by a fundamental law of nature. 'It was like the Conservation of Mass within our family,' says Malow, adding that 'fat can neither be created nor destroyed.' Last year Malow performed for colleagues at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. 'We found his humor delightfully nerdy, and he fitted right in,' said Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and author. 'It's one thing to make people laugh when they're sitting in a darkened club room, with a few drinks in them. It takes real talent to be funny in the afternoon, in a work environment.' Malow's interest in science and nature also extends to his passion for insects, with Web site InsectPaparazzi, and he has even discovered a species of fly. 'Of course, I found it in Golden Gate Park,' he says. 'So it may have just been a tourist.'"

There are jokes on slashdot we "get" everyday without seeing - mainly Futurama quotes in the HTTP headers [network-tools.com]. I've known about this for a while, and before I discovered that (very useful) nwtools.com site, I would just telnet port 80 to get them. On that note, anyone know of a good futurama video site?

I've always heard that one as
Two hydrogen atoms are walking around and all of the sudden one of them says, "I think I've just lost my electron!"
The other replies, "Are you sure?"
The first says, "I'm positive!"

I really enjoyed the first few episodes of "The Big Bang Theory" (until they went more mainstream) for the same reason I love Slashdot humor. I tried to show the series to a Comm. Arts major / friend of mine, and he just stared at me while I rolled on the floor laughing.

I completely agree. No matter how many times I've told people my signature was part of a larger cmd.exe prank, I was hiding the fact that I accidentally used that code for the real cmd.exe back when I was on the Microsoft NT team. It got me fired, because after the code shipped and users were complaining about freezing batch files, I was fired and since then I have burned my copy of The C Programming Language and started my own company.

So many projects would be so much better if your legacy dated language wasn't chosen. Yeah, I'm looking at you Linux and GTK. Writing a successful GUI program in C is just as ridiculous and time consuming as it gets.

This is probably why Gnome recommends writing new apps in Vala [slashdot.org], which are later translated into... ahem... C before being compiled.

Exactly so. Making science funny isn't really an achievement, when the person doing the judging is into science. Geeks do tend to like geek jokes. Also, business people tend not to insult their hosts' entertainment too often. To their faces, at least.

It does, I agree. It has great scripts and a talented cast. I just wish they could move away from the multi-camera sitcom format to a single camera show on location, without the studio audience. It would be ten times more funny in a drier, less mass-appeal format.

Many TV productions that claim to be "filmed in front of a live audience" often use a professional audience--people who are paid to be wildly enthusiastic and to laugh at the merest suggestion of a joke. That's why the audience reaction seems so fake in certain situations; it is fake.

"filmed in front of a live audience" often use a professional audience--people who are paid to be wildly enthusiastic and to laugh at the merest suggestion of a joke.

I was actually part of the studio audience for a Family Feud gameshow once (not paid). What they do is make you wait and wait such that you are so bored that ANYTHING is funny when the show finally rolls. In other words, sensory deprivation. (I'm not saying this is the only technique, but it's the one they used for that show.)

I don't agree, but I have to admit I might not have a good opinion as I've only seen a little of the show.

Watching Big Bang makes me cringe. It seems like the nerd/blonde stereotypes would work well for a 30 second family guy joke, but I can't stand to watch it for a whole show. And, from what I saw, it seemed like they were just throwing in scientific-sounding words. The majority of the show seemed to be based on the nerd stereotype, not jokes based on science.

Sometimes it's cringe-inducing. But I liked Sheldon's variation on rock/paper/scissors. To make it more interesting there were five choices, the two additional being lizard and Spock. For example, lizard poisons Spock; Spock disproves paper; etc.

I enjoyed the first few episodes before the studio tried to mainstream it too much. Those episodes were too geeky to be popular. In fact, the pilot opens with a joke about wave / particle duality. There are also several jokes early on about string theory that run like:

What's new in physics?

Nothing new has really happened in the last fifty years, unless you count string theory, and just about all you can say about that is "Oooh! Look! My math is internally consistent."

There's also an entire episode devoted to Schroedinger's cat.That kind of material is far enough into science that the listener probably needed to at least pay attention in freshman physics to get the joke. No prime-time show at that level can

In fact, the mere act of opening the box will determine the state of the cat, although in this case there were three determinate states the cat could be in: these being Alive, Dead, and Bloody Furious.

The blonde was originally just a device so that the nerds have to talk in a language comprehensible by normal folk.

Actually, from imdb's trivia for the show: "Penny was an add-on from a different sitcom concept."

Several responses in this thread have said that the show has gotten "more mainstream". I actually think it's gotten _less_ mainstream. The thing that bugged me for a long time was the totally cliched "nerdy guy is after the hot dumb girl" running plot, but they've mostly gotten past that. (Kaley

I am a studying a combined degree in engineering and physics, and I find big bang theory to be a most excellent show, and surprisingly not that cringe-inducing:P

The best thing I like about it is the writers gets the science right, something I have been very impressed about. Even the doodles on the blackboards are correct, in that they are formulas I am familiar with. Not to mention Sheldon has the same concerns about quantum teleportation as I do!! That is a topic that no show I have ever watched ever touc

Ah, thanks for clearing that up. As I mentioned in my first post, I haven't seen much of the show so I probably wasn't familiar with the subject they were discussing. Maybe I'll give it another chance.

I just watched it, and I don't understand how you can call that genius. (If you mean genius humor.)

It's just so la-la... Genius humor is not the "he he he he" kind, and also not the belly-laugh kind.It's the kind where you are in one of two states: Either you are very excited, with a big smile, and nearly can't sit on your seat (pre-punchline), or you're like "Help, I can't breathe! HA HA HA HA HA Help!", while feeling the urge to literally roll on the floor, laughing (post-punchline).And I can hardly imagi

'We found his humor delightfully nerdy, and he fitted right in,' said Kevin Grazier, who is a planetary scientist and author.
Ugh, really? It's hard to keep feeling superior to the artsies when other scientists are using words like 'fitted' in this context.

In Kevin's defense, he says he was misquoted. Seeing that appalled him, too. So you can still respect scientists.

Whenever I've gotten a speeding ticket, I've thought about arguing with the Judge that the cop was lying on the ticket. He noted both where I was and how fast I was going, and since he can only measure one of those things, he's clearly lying about the other.

A speeding ticket for going 207,520,611 kph?! But this whole area is zoned as a hyperspace express route! That's way below the speed limit. And the maximum will be even higher when they finally get rid of that big rock in the way, I imagine.

Nice. More on the Newtonian level, my high school physics teacher said that police don't really issue speeding tickets, since the ticket will list your direction of travel at the time of the infraction. So it's really a velocity ticket.

Actually, he instructed us to correct the police officer on this if we were ever pulled over. He was a funny guy.

Whenever I've gotten a speeding ticket, I've thought about arguing with the Judge that the cop was lying on the ticket. He noted both where I was and how fast I was going, and since he can only measure one of those things, he's clearly lying about the other.

Make sure you video it and post a story about it on slashdot so we can have a really good laugh when you're jailed for contempt of court.

Correction: I didn't discover a new species of fly - but I did take a picture that may be the first known occurrence of a particular species in this part of the world (the Nearctic):
http://bugguide.net/node/view/21487 [bugguide.net]
(but it's a species known in other parts of the world)

A little offtopic, but I remember hearing a few years ago about a professor who had written and/or gathered together a bunch of song parodies and rhymes which served as mnemonics for students. I vaguely recall they were all biology related.

Unfortunately, I can't remember much about his/her name or school, and I figured this was as good a topic to ask the folks here.